We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

The Cross is Revelation and Salvation
The way Christ saved us from the curse of the law was “by becoming a curse for us” (Gal. 3:13). So too, the way Christ freed us from the condemnation of sin and enabled us to “become the righteousness of God” was by becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). Getting this point is crucial to understanding my argument in Crucifixion of the Warrior God and the forthcoming Cross Vision (Due out August 15). What is more, since the curse of the law includes enslavement to “the elemental spiritual forces of this world” (Col. 2:20), we may add that the way Christ freed us from the fallen powers was by voluntarily identifying with our enslavement to the powers. This self-sacrificial act “canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness which stood against us and condemned us,” for by this means God “disarmed the powers and authorities” and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them on the cross” (Col. 2:14-15; 1 Cor. 2:8; 1 Jn.3:8).
God reveals the perfect love that God eternally is as Father, Son, and Spirit by humbly condescending in his relationship with us. God’s love was most definitively revealed in his greatest condescension, which occurred on Calvary when God stooped to become what is antithetical to himself—viz. our sin and our curse. God’s triune unity was most perfectly revealed when Jesus, out of love for humankind, experienced God-forsakenness on the cross, for God’s unity is other-oriented love, and for the Son of God to experience God-forsakenness on behalf of fallen humanity is its supreme expression. We could sum up this point by saying that the greatest act of God’s condescension, and therefore the act that constitutes his fullest self-revelation, took place when God humbly and self-sacrificially entered into self-negation.
Combining this point about the revelation of God’s love with the opening paragraph on how Jesus saved us, we can see that the loving self-negation that was God’s supreme self-revelation was also the means by which God saved us from the curse of the law and rescued us from the oppression of Satan and the fallen powers. This is no coincidence, for revelation and salvation are inextricably bound up with one another. God saves us by revealing his true self to us, and he reveals his true self to us by saving us. Both are accomplished by God stooping to take on the “strange” and ‘alien” semblance of a God forsaken, law-cursed, criminal on Calvary. In other words, God’s supreme revelation, as well as our salvation, both take place by means of God’s loving self-negation.
This correlation between revelation and salvation should not surprise us, for going back to the garden when humanity first fell, our alienation from God and bondage to Satan has been most fundamentally rooted in the false picture of God the serpent tempted us with (Gen. 3). We are alienated from God primarily because we are deceived about God’s perfect character and thus cannot trust him. This is why it is no coincidence that the one who finally reveals what God is really like is also the one who saves us from our bondage to the powers. The revealed “Word” is the” Savior,” and he’s the one precisely because he’s the other, and both roles culminated when God experiences other-oriented self-negation, becoming our sin, our curse and our bondage on Calvary.
Photo credit: decafinata via Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA
Related Reading

A Brief Theology of Salvation
In the NT, one of the most frequent and fundamental images used to depict our salvation is “redemption.” The root of this term lytron means a “ransom” or “price of release,” and the term itself (apolytrosis) was used as a kind of technical term for the purchase of a slave. If we apply this to…

Jesus Did Not Teach Ethical Behavior
Image by a2gemma via Flikr Paul teaches that love is not rude (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). If we forget that the New Testament is about the new life given us in Jesus Christ, we easily misinterpret this passage to be an ethical injunction. We read it saying, “Thou shall not be rude.” So in sincere obedience we set…

The Only Thing That Matters Is Love: The Kingdom of God (Part 3)
To say that living in Calvary-quality love is the most important thing in our life is to grossly understate its importance. This stands in distinction from how we typically define the Kingdom of God. But it stands in line with the fact that Jesus is the Kingdom of God. Paul says the “the only thing…

Who You Are Reflects the Kind of God You Worship
We always reflect the mental picture of God that we envision, for better or worse. If you have a fear-based picture of God, it will even affect the structure of your brain. You become the kind of person that you worship. If you have a threatening picture of God, you become threatening. If you have a…

Greg and N.T. Wright at the Missio Alliance Gathering!
The Missio Alliance North American Gathering will be held April 27-29 in Alexandria, Virginia. The theme this year is Awakenings: The Mission of the Spirit as the Life of the Church. Featured speakers this year include Jorge Acevedo, Greg Boyd, Ruth Padilla Deborst, Tammy Dunahoo, Todd Hunter, Dr. Charles A. Montgomery, Jr., Cherith Nordling, Rev. Dr. Howard-John…

The Heresy of “Just War”
Since the time when the Jesus-looking kingdom movement was transformed into the Caesar-looking “militant and triumphant” Church, there has been a tradition of Christians by-passing the enemy-loving, non-violent teachings of the NT and instead appealing to the precedent of divinely-sanctioned nationalism and violence in the OT whenever they felt the need to justify engaging in…